In 1978, fresh out of college, I traveled to the South Pacific to study man’s relationship to the sea in isolated island communities. I settled in with a family in a tiny village at the end of a dirt road on Raiatea, in French Polynesia.

On my first night with them, without thinking about it, I used the western-style toilet in their thatched house. That was a mistake. They had such a toilet only because the house had been built by an American visitor decades earlier (foreigners couldn’t own property). Only afterward did I realize the toilet wasn’t hooked up to any plumbing. Embarrassment doesn’t begin to describe my feelings. As I would figure out a bit later, they did what needed to be done on a nearby beach.

Almost everywhere, sanitation is not an easy subject. But the lack of it kills far more people each year than warfare does.

On Thursday, the United Nations Development Program held an event in Manhattan aimed at raising the profile of one of our most basic needs — a place to defecate — and highlighting the glaring lack of sanitary ways to accomplish this fundamental facet of biology in the world’s poor places.

At one of the busiest entrances to Central Park, two-dimensional figures created by a group called the German Toilet Organization (I kid you not) squatted behind a variety of objects –- an umbrella, a briefcase, a boulder –- for an unmistakable purpose. Each figure was emblazoned with a logo asking, “Where would you hide? 2.6 billion people toiletless.”

Fatimah Bamun, 14, was the only girl in her fourth-grade class in Balizenda, Ethiopia, where a lack of sanitation threatens education for girls. (Credit:
Vanessa Vick for The New York Times)

At the event in Manhattan, about 20 people held signs with numbers and related statistics. One was 194. The message? About 194 million school days are lost each year, in part because many girls stay home when schools lack toilets. (And often the school toilet is the worst in many rural villages.)

The man holding number 63 was Ingvar Anderson, who recently retired after several decades working to advance sanitation for the United Nations, mainly in sub-Saharan Africa.

“The toilet is something we always put at the back of our minds,” he said. “In the United States, you don’t even say you’re going to the toilet. You’re going to the bathroom, or the restroom.”

In East Africa, where he spent many years, he said that village men, heading out discreetly to do their business, would use a Swahili phrase that means “going to dig some roots.”

Olav Kjorven, the director of the bureau for development policy of the U.N.D.P., said the fraction of humanity without adequate toilets and sanitation had dropped to 42 percent in 2002 from 51 percent in 1990, but said that was grossly inadequate.

“This is an amazing policy failure,” he said, noting that studies had estimated that every $1 spent on sanitation produced $9 in improved productivity through better health and other benefits.

“The economics are there, the technology is simple, and the morality of it is clear,” he said. “What’s lacking is the will.”
[UPDATE, 3/21, 9 a.m.:]
There are plenty of technologies for dealing with feces at various levels of sophistication and cost. Search for “ecological sanitation” to get a view. Here’s one design, illustrated in a YouTube video:

But humanity continues to move ever more to towns and cities, with the density and numbers far outpacing the development of infrastructure. I’ll be exploring this question later this year. It’s, well, not pretty, but pretty vital to figure out in a world heading toward 9 billion individuals, each with a digestive system with two ends.

I’m curious why composting human waste isn’t more common. I’ve read Joseph Jenkins’ “Humanure Handbook” (//books.google.com/books?id=R58LAAAACAAJ) and once you get over the idea of it (as a western city-dweller who has indoor plumbing) it seems to make a lot of sense.

If we image when we want to go to toilet and can not find it, we will be so embarrass and uncomfortable. Therefore toilet is very important thing for human life. 2.6 billion people have no toilet, they go to rivers or anywhere for their defecate, then children play on there and get disease to die. Defecate pollution is important issue, we can not look is so easilly. Two days ago I read BBC news, it introduced one NGO help poor place just tell them where they should go for defecating. It is cheaper but very helpful supportment. Becuause no toilet 700,000 children die a year, it is not small numbers. Hope more and more NGO help these 2.6 billion solve no toilet problem. This is also fighting agaisnt poverty. By the way, yestoday my sister ask me how the astronaut go to toilet when they on craft? Who know this problem? This mean toilet is so important issue.

It’s a humorous and a serious subject, and you were kidding us not. Not only is there a German Toilet Organization, there is the World Toilet Organization (WTO) — I kid you not — in Singapore, and another one based in South Korea, where the CEO of the WTO built himself a house in the suburbs recently in the shape of an, uh, toilet. And Japan also has a Japan Toilet Association where they advocate beaming in classical music in all the public loo’s across Japan.

And then there’s the debate, also serious, about whether the squat toilets are better and more hygenic than the Western sit-down toilets.

We laugh, and humor helps, but life IS serious.

Does anyone know why the WC is called the W_____ C______? I have always wondered.

It is important to note that in less developed countries our toilets and sewage systems are often not appropriate. To some extent this has to do with the cost and how much, or little, these countries have to put towards waste disposal; public health is always a game of least cost to society, and this is difficult in societies that don’t have a lot of resources. Our toilet and sewage systems require heavy amounts of water, a very rare resource in many countries. Many resource poor communities suffer from theft, vandalism and poor maintenance of our toilet systems. The method of anal cleansing also dictates what kind of system can be used so that it is not damaged. Even once a good system is in place a change of habits must occur and a broader hygiene information campaign is necessary.

Essentially, it is important to be aware that the solution is likely to be a unique solution to the given environment and that it contains broader issues of governance, infrastructure, pay collection systems (community structure), hygiene information, skill in order to upkeep, community support (they must want this change or it will never work), financial security (for initial costs and upkeep costs), etc…

This is not to say nothing can be done. Increased awareness, funding, volunteered expertise and education are all necessary in order to change the current situation.

One may also doubt how well the World Bank actually does when it comes to helping out resource poor countries.

By ‘toilet’, does this article mean the kind of resource-wasting, flushable commode we use in the developed world? Is the article suggesting that it’s really possible for the ‘2.6 billion toiletless’ to start dumping their excretions in drinking water and flushing them away for processing like we do? It’s becoming impossible even for us to maintain such a stupid system! Water is a precious resource–there’s absolutely no reason it should be mixed with human waste, which is also a precious resource, full of nutrients that nourish soil microbial life and plants.

The collection and composting of this ‘humanure’ is a simple, cheap, elegant, sanitary and altogether appropriate tachnology for the developing (and the developed) world. Humanure composting can help to reclaim degraded agricultural soils. It saves water, and obviates the need for expensive plumbing and sewage facilities. All you need is a few buckets, a compost pile, and an open mind. And the payoff is the most lovely, rich compost imaginable (very important at a time when the cost of fossil-fuel derived fertilisers is soaing, pricing poorer farmers out of the market).

The wonderful Humanure Handbook by Joseph Jenkins, humanure pioneer, is available free online at //weblife.org/humanure/ (and there’s also a link on the page for downloading the pdf). Anyone proposing sanitation systems for the developing world should know about this system.

Like the Ancient Mariner, I’ll say it again: We should not docilely accept a nine billion population projection. We should work toward cutting our species to three billion. Absent that, we’re kidding ourselves to think that we’ll solve this, or any other, environmental problem.
Unfortunately, every environmentalist focuses on his or her one little part of the environmental elephant. This time it’s toilets. But the elephant is population.

This is a very intresting article, the solution is easier then some of the other issues facing the country. For starters dig a slit trench away from drinking water and not to close from where people reside. Second have an out house area, either elevate it or leave a flat board with an area underneath. In the bottom some type of drum. When its filled go dump it in the trench. Now this doesn’t provide toilet paper, but these are minimal resources to create a functioning snatiation system. The biggest problem will be organizing people to put one together, that can be done. I have used several of the type I just described, they are minimal at best but functional. If you build them of concrete, they will last for years maybe decades.

Apparently, voiding on a beach in French Polynesia does not hurt the environment.

In the first century BC, the citizens of a section of Rome dragged the body of Pompey Strabo theough the streets because his legions, camped outside the walls, fouled the water table and wells with their excrement. It did not have to be that way. His son, Pompey the Great, learned from this lesson and his encamped legions used properly positioned slit trenches.

I have used outhouses and many of our grandparents have. Depending upon the population density, toilets are not a necessity. The flush toilet has been in widespread use for only about the last 200 years.

Several years ago I spent a year in Ghana, West Africa. My having to stumble into an outhouse in the dead of night in pouring rain was merely inconvenient. The deficiency in public sanitation has much graver social and economic consequences.

Quite a few of Ghana’s magnificent beaches are virtually off-limits because for nearby villages the sand is the only place to ‘go’.

On one early morning walk to visit a tourist attraction near to my seaside cottage, I was forced to turn back because of the minefield of “turd” stretching for miles. More inconvenience too at having to constantly avert my eyes at the sight of scores of the locals coming to do ‘number 2′.

I’m no scientist, but seeing people walking around in the mess, bathing in nearby pools of running water and drinking from same sources, I could clearly see otherwise preventable diseases waiting to happen.

My complaint to the village chief was well-received. The owner of the guest house where I stayed, he was also a former minister of the Environment. A meeting of the elders was called to address the subject by educating the locals about the dangers of the practice and providing communal toilets.

I can only hope that on my next visit I’ll be able to complete that aborted early morning excursion.

Yeah? Well one time I, a senior, had to go behind a large shipping container outside the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens behind the Museum after searching in vain for a public toilet. For all I know it’s still there.

OOOH YUCK!
Great time for some outhouse stories.
I lived in the back woods on a mountain in Vermont and had an outhouse for 12 years (half years). After a while the door fell off and that was fine until mom visited. Had to drape a blanket over the door opening.
When we had our big Bread and Puppet Festival we needed some facilities. We built four seaters from cheap lumber and dug trenches under them. We had about three sets and before the festival we’d tip them over and dig them out with a little bucket loader. During the festival there were lines and it was sort of fun waiting in line, colloquial.
It is embarrassing to see Haitian slums (for instance) with mud in between shanties made of corrugated roofing and have to wonder about “facilities.”
After Katrina I thought that it might have been nice to invite crews of Haitians to help clean up in exchange for the materials they were cleaning up. There was a lot of plywood and lumber that used to be houses and probably most of it was wasted. It could have been taken back to Haiti even it was used to improve the slums and to build “facilities.”
In California I saw a story about people who collected exterior plywood garage doors that were being replaced. They took them to Mexico to rebuild the shanties. Even though by McMansion standards this is a sad state of affairs it was better then before and perhaps some of that material went into outhouses also.

Perhaps the human-induced predicament looming ominously before the family of humanity is so large that people cannot see the whole of it and, therefore, are not able to see the world’s “problematique” for what it is?

Imagine the “world problematique” as something gigantic. You are standing next to ‘IT’, trying to gain an adequate appreciation of its colossal size. But because you are standing so close it, it is not possible to see much of it. You can see on a small portion of THE problem.

The experience would be like being placed suddenly at the corner of Fifth Avenue and 34th Street. You do not know how you got there and have not ever been to New York City. But there you are, looking around.

Also standing on the same corner is another visitor who asks you, “How big is the Empire State Building? Somebody told me it is one of the biggest buildings in the world; but from where we are standing, there is nothing I see that makes it particularly impressive. The building looks like many others I have seen while walking these streets.”

Why should this come to public and political attention when we’ve got so many more important issues, like Eliot Spitzer’s sex life, Barack Obama’s church attendance, Hillary Clinton’s marriage, etc. Amazing that there are good people fighting through this insanely noisey environment to be heard on issues that actually matter.

Boy, what I take for granted. The only way I can even begin to relate to this is through my own backpacking experiences. And in those cases, I was always respectful of my natural environment by burying anything or packing it out. And that was always out of respect for the natural environment and all the other species who might be impacted by my human waste.
This speaks, yet again, to overpopulation of our species. Imagine if we were talking about 2.6 billion of another species defacating in public? We’d be on it in a second.
When evaluating how much we spend on our military defense or keeping nasty, awful, unconscionable murderers and child molesters alive in jail…then it seems ludicrous we or any other wealthy country can’t assist the poorer countries to develop better sanitation systems and practices.
This is disgusting.
I cannot help but imagine what an incredible place planet Earth would be if only the human being finally decided to help one another, as in, wealthy countries helping poorer countries with the simplest of needs. The technology for clean sanitation already exists.
What about composting toilets in some of these regions?
All I know is near my own town some forty miles away there is a huge population of homeless people. The downtown area in Arcata has been bombarded with a problem of homeless people defacating on public buildings and around neighborhoods. I remember the entrance to a hike in Calistoga even where a group of homeless people lived at the trail head. The smell, the idea, etc. was intolerable as we set out on that beautiful climb to a magnificent set of ridges. In those two incidents it was not due to lack of sanitation technology, it was due solely to lack of facilities to accommodate the homeless.
I just can’t imagine people being forced to live like this and then again, here too, in my own country there are people living in pretty wretched conditions.
This seems shameful to be discussing this in the 21st century, year 2008.
Elizabeth Tjader

Our instinctual revulsion towards our waste products is natural, and there’s a survival imperitive for its existence, but we should be intelligent and aware enough to realize that our waste is actually needed to be wisely treated, and that is not synonymous with “washed awaw with clean drinking water” or “left to ferment and seep into our water table”. Exposed to air and sunlight, humidity and bacteria it quickly is reduced to nutrients and reintroduced into the ecology from which it came, ultimately to return to us in indirect but unmistakable ways that we as supposedly intelligent beings need to recognize if we wish to avoid the stupidity that comes from self inflicted blindness…or we’ll really be stepping in it.
That said I find it amusing to read all the comments that equate pooping with emitting CO2…which is what plants need to make the food we eat! The parallels are unmistakable. These observations are correct in a revealing way but again letting instinctual fear and revulsion take the place of rational thought, emotional instincts and fear are once again leading us into decisions that will ultimately be proved to be a case of self-inflicted blindness and wasted efforts typical of this kind of stupidity. I hope we don’t end-up regretting it too badly but by convincing ourselves that science must not be self-falsifiable, as is the case with the IPCC’s position regarding scientific research into the causes of climate change, I’m afraid we are destined to do a lot of wheel spinning at great costs before we really make much headway in a truly conscious approach to our world’s sustaining systems.

Most of humankind relied on old-fashioned slit trenches or outhouses for thousands of years, and these still work quite well — if and where population isn’t dense and growing.
I lived on a farm in Oakland Park, a once-rural town near Fort Lauderdale, for several years in the 1940s and my family used an outhouse. Today the old farm has been developed into perhaps a thousand houses and condominiums, so of course a sophisticated sanitation system is essential.
As an academic and historian reminded me recently, the core cause of a host of current concerns, from global warming to epidemic disease to hunger and tribal warfare, is that the population of the world continues to grow at a rapid rate.
If population continues to grow, at some point all the innovative solutions won’t be enough to cope with the problems.

Thanks for the post. The approach to voiding by those people in Ghana is incomprehensible. It can not be through ignorance. From what you write, they did not even dig a hole in the sand before they squat. This has got to be some sort of cultural distaste for expending minimal effort or unwillingness to put out effort when it is so easy to walk away. “What me worry?”

If they had flush toilets, they would not put any effort into keeping them repaired and functional. These people are homo sapiens sapiens. It is not ignorance or stupidity or the inability to figure it out for them selves.

For the most fortunate people among us in the human community to do so little for others, who are much less fortunate, and to willfully disregard our children’s need of a planetary home fit for human habitation, is the most unconsionable and intolerable of human tragedies.

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By 2050 or so, the human population is expected to pass nine billion. Those billions will be seeking food, water and other resources on a planet where humans are already shaping climate and the web of life. Dot Earth was created by Andrew Revkin in October 2007 -- in part with support from a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship -- to explore ways to balance human needs and the planet's limits.